The University Hospitals Leuven is consolidating and upgrading its oncology capabilities within a new 25,000 m2 oncology centre at its Gasthuisberg Campus. Professional services firm Royal HaskoningDHV has been hired to provide design and engineering services as part of a consortium including Wiegerinck. The contract is valued at €3 million.

The University Hospitals Leuven (UHL) is upgrading its existing oncology facilities with a new 25,000 m2 oncology centre that consolidates and provides considerable upgrades on its current offering. The new centre will provide 35,000 patients per year with a patient-centric centre, focused on providing the latest treatments while improving quality of life. The new centre will have a variety of functions, including diagnosing and treating patients from across Belgium, coordinating clinical research and delivering prevention programmes, and house the country’s largest centre for allogeneic stem cell transplantation.

To find a team to design the new centre, the UHL ran an international competition. The winners of the contract are a consortium between Royal HaskoningDHV, who are to provide structural design, building services, acoustics, fire safety and project management, and Wiegerinck, who are tasked with architectural and landscape design. LOW Architecten, will provide additional capacity for the project. The design and engineering contract is reported to be valued at €3 million.

The centre will be built on the UHL’s Gasthuisberg Campus, and will be linked to other buildings on the lot. The construction process has, according to the project team, been planned in such a way as to reduce disruption to ongoing hospital services.

Eduard Boonstra, International Business Development Director at Royal HaskoningDHV, says, “This will be a building for the future which operates with virtually zero energy, and has the flexibility to adapt as requirements change. In addition, our modelling work, which includes total cost of ownership methodology, aids decision making for scenarios like patient flow, clinical pathways, organisation and quality.”

Annemie Glorieux, head of URS Management at University Hospitals Leuven, says, “This will be a centre of excellence, delivering highly specialised and sophisticated cancer treatment. Wiegerinck and Royal HaskoningDHV understand the challenges of the hospital environment and bring with them considerable experience from the highly rated Dutch healthcare system. Total cost of ownership was also an important criterion for us and we were impressed with features such as low energy requirements and durability.”

Royal HaskoningDHV has previously worked on other oncology related centres, including the development of the Danish National Particle Centre. The firm has also joined forces with Wiegerinck before: they have, among others, worked together on a project at VU University Medical Imaging Centre in Amsterdam and jointly supported the setup of a new health care campus at Hilversum.